The terminal's glow was a rhythmic, hypnotic pulse of cobalt that reflected in the UNI agent's glasses. To him, I was a series of zeros and ones nearing completion. To Yuri, I was a woman worth burning an empire for. To myself, I was finally a variable they hadn't accounted for.
"Don't do it, Jessy," Yuri commanded, his voice barely a whisper. He wasn't looking at the agent anymore; he was looking at me, his eyes pleading. "If you touch that screen, you don't just give them the data. You give them you. You'll be a ghost in their machine forever."
"She doesn't have a choice," the UNI agent countered, stepping closer. "Look at her mother, Yuri. The neural inhibitors are already peaking. Without the stabilization sequence only Jessy can provide, her mind will be a blank slate in sixty seconds."
I looked at my mother. She was drifting, her eyes rolling back, her breathing shallow. The "Phoenix Protocol" was a parasite, and she was the host currently being consumed to force my hand.
I reached for the tablet. My fingers hovered over the glass.
The agent's smile widened. Yuri shifted his weight, his hand twitching toward the hidden blade in his sleeve. But I didn't press the "Transfer" icon. I didn't initiate the "Save" sequence.
Instead, I used the hidden command I had found in the "Generation Zero" files—the "Back-door" my father had left not for the UNI, but for the end of the world. I began to input a recursive loop, a digital Ouroboros that would force the code to eat itself.
"What are you doing?" the agent hissed, his smile faltering as the terminal's blue light began to flicker and turn a violent, angry red. "The data! You're corrupting the sectors!"
"I'm not corrupting them," I said, my voice sounding strange even to me—layered with the digital resonance of the code. "I'm executing the 'Final Handshake.' My father didn't build a vault, and he didn't build a test. He built a bomb."
The room began to vibrate. The red emergency lights overhead pulsed in sync with the crashing of the terminal.
"The code isn't just in my DNA," I realized, looking at my mother as a spark of recognition returned to her eyes. "It's a localized EMP trigger. If I complete the loop, every UNI server within ten miles fries. The Positano villa, the research labs, the extraction teams... all of it goes dark."
"You'll kill us all!" the agent screamed, lunging for me.
Yuri was faster. He didn't use a gun. He moved with the raw, silent grace of a wolf, his blade catching the agent under the chin before he could reach the terminal.
"No," Yuri rasped as the agent slumped to the floor. "She's just clearing the board."
I hit the final 'Enter.'
The sound wasn't an explosion. It was a vacuum—a sudden, absolute silence as every electronic device in the room, and the mountain, died. The terminal screen shattered. The IV pump stopped humming. The floodlights outside vanished.
In the absolute darkness that followed, I heard my mother draw a deep, ragged breath.
"Jessy?" she whispered. This time, there was no code in her voice. Just a mother.
I felt Yuri's hand find mine in the dark. It was warm, real, and finally, free of the shadow of the Ledger.
"The ghosts are gone," I whispered.